Might such motivated arguments belie a deeper purpose, a compulsion to control others, to limit their freedoms, in the name of ensuring one’s own liberty? Surprisingly, the cause—so secretive in so many other respects—has given us the answer.
Charles Koch has always argued that his vision of a good society will bring prosperity to all. But his trusted cadre, the people he relies upon to justify and advance his messianic vision, apparently believe otherwise. They have sketched out the society that will emerge if their cause succeeds (while wiping their own fingerprints from the story of its emergence). What does that society look like? And what will they have to do to our people and our democracy to secure it?
Koch learned as a young adult, from his mentor Baldy Harper, that “the great social problem of our age is that of designing the preventive medicine that will stop the eroding of liberty in the body politic.” Harper warned that “once the disease has advanced, a bitter curative medicine is required to gain already-lost liberty.”14 James Buchanan revealed just how bitter the medicine would be. People who failed to foresee and save money for their future needs, Buchanan wrote in 2005, “are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to . . . animals who are dependent.”15
Tyler Cowen, the man who succeeded Buchanan and now directs the cause’s base camp at George Mason, the Mercatus Center, has explained that with the “rewriting of the social contract” under way, people will be “expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now.” While some will flourish, he says, “others will fall by the wayside.” And because “worthy individuals” will manage to climb their way out of poverty, “that will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind.” Cowen foresees that “we will cut Medicaid for the poor.” Also, “the fiscal shortfall will come out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers” from employers and a government that does less. To “compensate,” the chaired professor in the nation’s second-wealthiest county recommends, “people who have had their government benefits cut or pared back” should pack up and move to lower-cost states like Texas. Granted, he says, “Texas is skimpy on welfare benefits and Medicaid coverage,” and nearly three in ten of its residents have no health insurance, but the state does have jobs and “very cheap housing” to offset its “subpar public services.”16
Indeed, Cowen forecasts, “the United States as a whole will end up looking more like Texas.” His tone is matter-of-fact, as though he is simply reporting the inevitable. And he enjoys great authority, as his blog, The Marginal Revolution, is the most visited intellectual blog in professional economics, known for criticizing Republicans as well as Democrats, and also respected for Cowen’s signature incorporation of economic concepts to analyze cultural phenomena from food to travel. He presents himself as a pragmatic libertarian (indeed, the blog’s motto is “small steps toward a much better world”). Yet when one reads his flip remarks on the fate now facing his fellow citizens with the knowledge that he has been the leader of a team working in earnest with Charles Koch for two decades to bring about the society he is describing, the words assume a different weight. They sound like a premeditation. For example, the economist prophesies lower-income parts of America “recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment” complete with favelas like those in Rio de Janeiro. The “quality of water” might not be what U.S. citizens are used to, but “partial shantytowns” would satisfy the need for cheaper housing as “wage polarization” grows and government shrinks. “Some version of Texas—and then some—is the future for a lot of us,” the economist advises. “Get ready.”17
Those who subscribe to the libertarian philosophy believe that the only legitimate role of government is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense. That is why they have long been fervent opponents of Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, and, most recently, Obamacare. The House budget chairman, Paul Ryan, has explained that such public provision for popular needs not only violates the liberty of the taxpayers whose earnings are transferred to others, but also violates the recipients’ spiritual need to earn their own sustenance. He told one audience that the nation’s school lunch program left poor children with “a full stomach—and an empty soul.”18
Less well known is that these zealots do not believe that the government should be involved in trying to promote public health, period. We are not talking about subsidized hip replacements and birth control. We are talking about things like basic sanitation, something governments have committed to since the Progressive Era as the single most important measure to stop waterborne epidemics such as cholera and typhoid.
The Republican majority in Congress has “systematically cut public health budgets that address Zika, Ebola and other ailments,” notes the columnist Nicholas Kristof.19 The insiders’ thinking helps explain why. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina state senator elevated to the U.S. Senate in 2014 with backing from the Koch apparatus, has said that restaurants should be able “to opt out of” laws requiring employees to wash their hands after using the toilet, “as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.’ The market will take care of that.”20
Even before Obamacare was enacted, a public choice economist funded by the Liberty Fund, Gary M. Anderson, produced a study alleging that the field of public health was, from its beginning in the early twentieth century, nothing more than “a major device used by organized interest groups to redistribute wealth to themselves.”21 Amity Shlaes, a libertarian journalist on the Wall Street Journal editorial board and author of a best-selling book based on Buchanan’s ideology, The Forgotten Man, came to a similar conclusion as the fight over Obamacare began. She “found that public choice theory explained everything,” including that “health officials’ interest in testing small children’s blood for lead made sense when one considered that finding poisoned children validated their jobs.”22
The largely African American population of Flint, Michigan, knows firsthand what will happen to “people who fall by the wayside” in the new political economy run by people who think this way. The Flint scandal broke because of a mother who would not give in. When she appealed to the appointed city manager and Republican governor in late 2014 because her daughter’s hair was falling out, her older son was suffering abdominal pain, and her twins were developing untreatable rashes, they brushed aside her concerns. It was not until she found scientific experts from another state who were willing to help that most Americans learned of the worst public health disaster in state history. “For 18 months, 100,000 residents were exposed to toxic water,” explained one Ph.D. student. No amount of lead in water is safe, especially for children, whose developing brains and bodies are so vulnerable; exposure can cause irreversible mental impairment.23
What happened in Flint was not a natural disaster. Nor a case of governmental incompetence. What happened there was directly attributable to the prodding of the Mackinac Center, one of the first Koch-funded—and in this case, Koch-staffed—state-level “think and do” tanks that now exist in all fifty states and are affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN), also Koch-concocted, to coordinate efforts to prevent state governments from responding to the demands of the “takers.”24
“When the Mackinac Center speaks, we listen,” said Michigan governor John Engler in 1994. Indeed, so did his successors. In 2011, the center pushed hard for legislation that would allow the governor to take over all aspects of local government in any community facing a “financial emergency” and hand control over to an emergency manager. The powers of these unelected managers to impose austerity measures would be vast, including the authority to unilaterally abrogate collective bargaining agreements, outsource services, sell off local resources to private companies, and change suppliers at will. By 2009, more than half of the deindustrializing and economically troubled state’s black voters were being governed by such appointed emergency mana
gers, among them the residents of Detroit, Benton Harbor, and Flint. “It’s dictatorship, plain and simple,” one city commissioner said of the new system. To save money, Flint’s appointed city manager switched the source of the city water supply to the polluted Flint River. The Mackinac Center lobbyists, by the way, made sure that the law incorporated provisions to protect the appointed managers from lawsuits. Given the scale of the damage they had every reason to know they would inflict, that was a wise protection of potential future foot soldiers for the cause.25
Is it any surprise, then, that those who would put public sanitation and clean water at risk are now the leading proponents of climate change denial? Or that before embarking on this mission, Buchanan’s students and colleagues were producing economic analyses funded by the tobacco industry to discredit the “paternalists” who would deny cigarette companies, smokers, and those in their immediate surroundings their “voluntary choice” in a misguided “majoritarian” quest, pushed by “rent-seeking interest groups” whose “appeal to the ‘public’s health’ is essentially just political rhetoric designed to camouflage the coercion”? Or that these economists would insinuate that government-funded researchers would never find a cure for cancer because that “would put many cancer bureaucrats out of work”?26
Just as the property rights supremacists would rather let people die than receive health care assistance or antismoking counsel from government, so they would rather invite global ecological and social catastrophe than allow regulatory restrictions on economic liberty. The Koch cadre identified the public’s embrace of environmentalism as a problem early on. Back in 1997, for example, the same year that Charles Koch made his first big contribution to George Mason, yet another Koch operation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, warned its corporate allies that 76 percent of Americans thought of themselves as environmentalists. “Worse, 65 percent” told industry pollsters that they “do not trust business” to take action against pollution, and “79 percent of voters think current regulations are about right or ‘not strict enough.’”27 The lesson the cadre took from this was that it could not win majorities to its true goals. So what was to be done? “It might be hard to admit,” said the chair of the economics department at George Mason, Donald J. Boudreaux, but because public choice showed that a government cure would be worse (from their perspective, of course) than the disease, global warming “is best left alone.”28
That advice was rejected by serious scientists and concerned citizens, so the Cato Institute and the Independent Institute joined a circle of less-known Koch-funded libertarian think tanks driving what two science scholars describe as systematic environmental “misinformation campaigns.” They spread junk pseudoscience to make the public believe that there is still doubt about the peril of climate change, a tactic they learned from the tobacco companies that for years sowed doubt about science to keep the public from connecting smoking and illness.29 Even more galling are the personal attacks on scientists that suggest, as one Koch-subsidized organization has done, that climate scientists are seeking personal monetary rewards. “All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train” reads a typical headline (a smear more scandalous when you consider that it was coming from operatives on retainer to a billionaire).30
The Koch team by then could count on its Club for Growth to fund primary challenges to ensure that the party line on environmentalism would be maintained by Republican members of Congress. That explains why Senator John McCain is but the best-known—and once most principled—Republican to flip his position after being faced with a Tea Party primary challenge. By 2014, only 8 of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real.31 “We’re looking at a party,” the economist and columnist Paul Krugman rightly points out, “that has turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very future of civilization at risk.”32
Backing up that chokehold on federal action is what one reporter called a “secretive alliance” between red-state attorneys general and fossil fuel corporations to litigate in federal courts with “unprecedented” coordination to obstruct environmental and other regulatory efforts.33 The use of state government power to undercut national reforms follows a strategy of “competitive federalism” advocated by Buchanan and inspired by John C. Calhoun’s constitutional theory and Jack Kilpatrick’s application of it to fight the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education. You could call it the “race to the bottom” by intentional design, now led by the American Legislative Exchange Council and advocated by the entire Koch-funded State Policy Network, which provides scholarly legitimacy for the state legislators’ actions.34 Advised by the Wisconsin affiliate on his agenda since taking office as governor, Scott Walker’s administration imposed a gag order in 2015 to prohibit employees charged with oversight of state-owned land from even discussing climate change on the job.35
To put all this another way: if the Koch-network-funded academics and institutions were not in the conversation, the public would have little doubt that the evidence of science is overwhelming and government action to prevent further global warming is urgent.36 Sadly, however, their campaigns are working. The number of Americans who believed that “the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate” dropped from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.37
A different kind of catastrophe is under way in the nation’s public school system, a target of the Mont Pelerin Society cause since the 1950s—well before the rise of powerful teachers’ unions, it bears noting. Rather than admit their ideological commitment to ending public education, they have convinced a sizable segment of the American population that the problems in schools today are the result of those teachers’ unions having too much power. In the states where they have won control, like my own state of North Carolina, the cadre’s allied elected officials, pushed by affiliates of the State Policy Network, have rushed to pass laws to debilitate teachers’ unions, one bill being hurried through passage after midnight. The Republican-dominated North Carolina General Assembly then also cut seven thousand teacher assistants, allotted $100 million less than the state budget office said was needed merely to maintain the schools, and budgeted $500 million less to public schools than it had in 2008. Even the school supplies budget was cut by more than half; students can no longer take home textbooks in some poor communities, for fear they may be lost.38
Where is this money going? Into corporate America, to a new “education industry” of private schools, many of which are held to no standards or even disclosure requirements. One shocked superior court judge found that the North Carolina General Assembly had violated the state constitution in sending children with tax subsidies to “private schools that have no legal obligation to teach them anything.” (His verdict was overruled by the state supreme court, which the Koch cadre had spent handsomely to control for just such eventualities.) The new for-profit virtual charter schools, whose CEO personally earned $4 million in 2014, were found, by one Stanford University research study, to have left their enrolled students falling far behind their public school counterparts, equivalent to missing “72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math” in a 180-day school year. In other words, the online schools in this study taught nothing in math, and little in reading.39 As a result of all this, North Carolina, which during the twentieth century, through wise investments in public education, had climbed from the poorest of southern states to one of the best-off, now ranks beneath Mississippi in per-pupil spending.40
Just as the radical right seeks, ultimately, to turn public education over to corporations, so it pushes for corporate prisons. The mission seems important enough that Alexander Tabarrok, a GMU economist then moonlighting as research director for the Koch-funded Independent Institute, issued a whole book on the subject in 2003, with the coy title Changing the Guard. “We now know that private prisons can be built more quickly, operated at lower cost, and maintained at a quality level at least as high as government-run
prisons,” Tabarrok announced. While warning of “special-interest groups, in particular the correctional agencies and the prison guard unions” that push for more prison spending, he neglected to note how the profit motive could lead private prison corporations to push for tougher sentencing to drive up prison populations and to cut costly items such as job training and substance abuse counseling.41
After all, it was by then a common operating principle among insiders that, as the cause’s Stephen Moore had argued two decades earlier, turning public functions over to corporations was a “potent strategy” to “create new pro-privatization coalitions,” because the corporations that profit from the spun-off government functions would push for further change.42 And sure enough, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has become a powerful lobbying force for further privatization—as well as a donor to Koch’s Reason Foundation, which pushes it.43 “Cashing In on Cons” was the apt title of an undercover report on a sector with annual revenue of more than $50 billion, CCA being among the most profitable players—and a very generous one with the Republican legislators who received 92 percent of its political contributions.44
In one emblem of the perverse incentives for-profit prisons have created, a Pennsylvania judge was convicted in a “‘cash for kids’ scheme” in which private detention centers paid judges $2.8 million in kickbacks for sentencing thousands of children to their facilities.45 With no rights or collective voice and few allies, detained immigrants have proven to be even more ideal commodities for a reliable cash stream to such corporations, so lucrative that one recent report on the facilities that house them bore the title “Banking on Detention.”46
Democracy in Chains Page 28